This book explores the remarkable but strangely unremarked upon popularity of Aleksandr Volkov's translation, adaptation, and reworking of L. Frank Baum's Oz series in the Soviet Union and Russia. Although Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900 and often referred to as the first American fairy tale, has been published in almost every written language, Volkov's “reworked version of Baum's story” is “undeniably the most popular and successful foreign edition” (7). Given the fact of anti-American sentiment in the Soviet Union, Haber asks how and why this came to be.

Haber's inquiry has taken her into both US and Russian archives, some quite far afield, enabling her to reconstruct with painstaking detail the lives of both Baum and Volkov. She describes the development of children's literature as an arena of publishing in both the United States and Russia, before and after the Revolution. In Russia, beginning in the nineteenth century, foreign works were frequently translated and adapted without necessarily giving credit to the original author (74). This remained common practice into the twentieth century. As Haber notes, ” … in early Soviet culture, borrowing content and radically changing its form, thus rewriting the original, was considered perfectly acceptable, even preferable, to make the text appropriate for Soviet ideology and censorship” (146). As such, it seemed natural to Russian publishers (and readers) that Volkov would essentially claim Baum's American story as his own. Notably, Volkov's Wizard of Emerald City was first published in 1939, a moment in which many artists and authors faced severe repression for failing to conform to official dictates. But it was also not long after that two key cultural arbiters, Maksim Gor΄kii and Samuil Marshak, called for more Soviet writers to try their hand at children's literature (135–36), and Gor΄kii helped make fairy tales acceptable to Soviet authorities “if they could be shown to express socialist themes and to help build strong moral character” (137). Despite a growing fear of all things foreign in the late 1930s, “adapting foreign stories, especially fairy tales, became popular during this time period because doing so allowed authors to find novelty and an escape from the template-driven plots and characters of Socialist Realism,” Haber notes (137). Volkov benefitted from reaching out to both Marshak and to the noted child development expert A.S. Makarenko, but it still took years for this unknown writer to get his manuscript published.

Haber's hunger for details is both her strength and weakness as scholar, for the level of specificity can become overwhelming at times, and the book would be more readable and impactful if it was tighter and shorter. Perhaps Haber's most original and interesting argument, based on careful readings of both the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels as well as the Magic Land series it spawned, is that Volkov's text “was not an overtly ideological revision, but a pedagogical one” (148). Baum's original story can best be understood as a rough draft for Volkov, who rewrote, added, and deleted with an eye toward making Baum's writing more clear and logical, rather than with an eye toward making it politically palatable. Volkov published a more substantial reworking of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1959; it was this version that “became the Russian classic that has been reprinted hundreds of times and translated into numerous other languages” (150). In an epilogue to this edition, Volkov notes the Magic Land's similarity to “the capitalist world … where the prosperity of the minority is built upon the exploitation and deception of the majority” (164). This was one of the only political statements that Volkov ever wrote about the series, Haber says. Had it been written for reasons other than to please publishers, Volkov would have sprinkled political messages throughout the book, she maintains. Haber insists that Volkov “did not attempt to “Russianize” or “Sovietize” his text, only changing a few details to make the story more familiar to Russian readers, like changing corn fields to wheat fields or having the Lion receive a glass of kvass, the popular Russian drink, for courage (156). By the turn of the twenty-first century “Volkov's books had sold over fifty million copies” (187) and had been adapted to a range of other media. Still, as with the Oz books, they were subject to very little critical consideration. When a faithful translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz finally appeared in Russia in 1991, Russians showed little interest (213–14), suggesting that Volkov was an artist in his own right.